Welcome to our live blog. Our main live blogger will be Devlin Barrett, joined by colleagues Siobhan Gorman, Danny Yadron and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries. The president is scheduled to begin speaking around 11 a.m.

Even before he utters a word, the president’s choice of venue – the Justice Department headquarters – speaks volumes about the direction he plans to take on issues of domestic surveillance.

It was the Justice Department that played a key role in 2009 when serious concerns were raised about the NSA’s oversight of its own programs – and it was the Justice Department which fought the White House back in 2004, ultimately forcing the Bush administration to put the programs under court supervision.

By giving the speech at the Justice building, Obama is telling the entire intelligence community that the Justice Department – i.e., the lawyers – will have an even stronger hand going forward in the debates over surveillance.

Of course, Mr. Obama also picked the Justice building because it doesn’t make much sense to have a public speech at the highly-secretive NSA building. Can’t have a bunch of reporters running around there.

THE SPEECH: According to a statement from a senior administration official early Friday, President Obama plans to call for an end to the government’s mass collection of American phone data and restructure the program so the data are held outside the government. You can read a full list of expected changes here.

Some interesting footnotes in the presidential directive tied to this NSA speech. One says spying should not be for economic competitive purposes, but foreign companies with “government influence or direction’’ could be targeted.

Footnote 5 in the presidential directive reminds us why definitions are so important in the NSA debate. Limitations on “bulk’’ collection do not apply to information “temporarily’’ taken to allow targeted searching.

That’s an interesting observation on hacking. The Obama administration seems to make a distinction that it doesn’t pass on information gained from these foreign companies to their American competitors. But that’s a fine line to walk.

The presidential directive also has a lot of “get back to me’’ orders: in 4 mos, the Intel Advisory Board should report on options for changing how information is shared among agencies. In 6 mos, the DNI should give a progress report on how the new rules are being implemented.

A final note on the directive as we shift to the speech: Also in the presidential directive: Within a year, Obama expects a report on the feasibility of creating software that would allow the government to more easily collect data in a “targeted” way, rather than relying on bulk collection. It will be interesting to see how possible that is.

Obama says it is “hard to overstate’’ how much 9/11 changed U.S. intelligence work.

“In our rush to respond to very real and novel threats, the risks of government overreach – the possibility that we lose some of our core liberties in pursuit of security – became more pronounced,’’ he said.

At the top of the speech, Obama lays out the historical role of surveillance and spying, including references to Paul Revere, Civil War era reconnaissance balloons, World War II code breaking and Cold War spying on the Soviets.

In his remarks, Obama says there are fewer and fewer things “we can’t do.” While that’s true, cool and kind of creepy, there are some things even the NSA hasn’t figured out. According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the intelligence community still has a hard time cracking the Tor network, which obscures your identity online by bouncing traffic between servers around the world. You can read about that here.

Obama points out that surveillance technology is “evolving much faster than our laws.” One of the most interesting parts of this NSA debate is the argument that these activities have all been legal—approved by the FISA court and Congress. Privacy advocates often make the case, though, that the laws governing these activities aren’t transparent and haven’t kept up with advances in technology.

One more thought on the directive released ahead of the speech: There’s not much in here addresses the No. 1 concern for most large tech companies: The ability to tell consumers more about the amount of data the government requests under Section 702, popularly known as Prism thanks to Edward Snowden.

Obama harkens back to the Founders: “Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends upon the law to constrain those in power.’’ And there’s the challenge of the intelligence community’s mantra of “trust us.’’

Obama cites an argument I’ve heard frequently from intelligence folks: that corporations also are taking a lot of our data for targeted ads and the like. But he also alludes to the “unique power of the state” as a reason the government should be held to a higher standard. In other words, it’s not weird to be worried about the government but not about Google. Google can’t put me in jail.

It’s worth remembering as Mr. Obama talks about changing programs from section 215 (business records) and 702 (Internet records) – the intel community views 702 as hugely important to anti-terrorism work, much more so than 215. Obama’s planned changes to Sec. 702 are significant, because the change acknowledges that current privacy protections for Americans caught up on mass foreign surveillance may be insufficient.

National Security Letters get a mention! These tools, which allow the FBI to get data from companies in secret without judicial oversight, have been largely overlooked amid the Snowden disclosures, which have focused on the NSA not the FBI.

Obama is calling for secrecy around NSLs to “terminate within a fixed time” instead of being indefinite. This is a pretty big deal, although I’d like to see how long this “fixed time” is.

Obama adopts critique of NSA phone data program set out by his handpicked review panel—citing the concerns about the potential for abuse. Allows him to thread the needle of calling for change without criticizing NSA.

The president wants “a new approach’’ to phone records collection that would allow them to stop taking nearly every Americans’ phone records. Such changes “should give the American people greater confidence that their rights are being protected.’’

Plenty of privacy advocates are wary of leaving the bulk phone metadata with private companies, as Obama is suggesting. One argument is that, if the companies hold this information, it could be subject to subpoena by state and local law enforcement or people in lawsuits, divorce cases and the like—years of data accessible to many people as opposed to just the NSA.

Obama declares there will be “a comprehensive review of Big Data and privacy’’ to look at how those issues are being handled by government and private business. That’s a pretty big job. Good luck to ‘em.

Obama says this debate goes “beyond a few months of headlines,” referring to the reporting on Snowden disclosures. But I wonder when this debate would have happened, were it not for Snowden and those headlines.

“This debate will make us stronger,’’ Obama says, adding that the U.S. “will have to lead.’’ Says he is frustrated how some assume the worst motives of the U.S. government, particularly versus rivals like China or Russia.

But says the U.S. is held to a different standard “because we have been at the forefront in defending personal privacy and human dignity.’’

Some significant changes were laid out here, particularly to the phone records program. Civil libertarians, who seem to get angrier with every new Snowden document, will find much encouraging here, but the president was careful to leave the overall framework of the post-9/11 surveillance state mostly intact.

For the tech industry, it’s more notable what Obama didn’t bring up today. He didn’t address letting companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft say more about what they hand over to the government. He didn’t address NSA efforts to weaken encryption standards, and he didn’t talk about U.S. efforts to scoop up data overseas from American companies. Nicole Miller, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, just posted on Twitter, “Obama isn’t addressing the weakening of tech co’s encryption technologies #NSAspeech.”

Indeed, the speech didn’t include mention of the issues most important to computer scientists: things like the deliberate weakening of security standards and tools, which experts say can put everyone at greater risk. My geek-heavy Twitter stream is displeased.

NSA sabotage of crypto standards was the thing most conspicuously absent for me.

Comments (5 of 13)

Hundreds of thousands of my grandparent's generation died in Europe and the Pacific to protect our civil liberties. To see how our government has spit on their graves because 3,000 people died on 9/11 is disgraceful. Yes, 9/11 was tragic, but the bigger tragedy was giving up any form of privacy to the government because of it. Our constitution does not allow the mass collection of our private communications. Would you be angry if all your mail was opened and inspected before it arrived in your mailbox? The history of the "Greatest Generation" must no longer be taught in the schools anymore. Our nation has lost perspective, has lost the lessons history has taught us about how evil governments can become. The hundreds of thousands that died deserve better than that. And I believe the 3,000 people who died in 9/11 would not approve of the mass collection of data from every aspect of our personal lives done on behalf of their death.

12:16 pm January 17, 2014

Next wrote:

Snowden will counterpunch and Obamy will look like the greater fool, again.

12:10 pm January 17, 2014

OWH wrote:

Since one judge already questioned the constitutionality of this action, "banning" it is little more than a PR move.

11:42 am January 17, 2014

My party? wrote:

As an independent, it tells me that you are a sheep if you have a party that you call your own.

Sucker. Keep working for the man, paying his dues and living like a pauper.

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